For the time being, she substitute taught in the Oakland and Berkeley schools, where she was offered a permanent position teaching art courses in 1973, she remained there for four years.
[3] By the late 1960s, Breuer was pouring water thinned washes of brightly colored acrylic paint onto large, wet, stretched, vertical canvases in her Bay Area studio.
[1] During a 1974 exhibition of those works at Zara Gallery in San Francisco, local gallerist Hank Baum suggested that she head to New York, where Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art were continuing to gain traction.
[2] It was in that studio that she began working with a palette knife, making direct, abstract marks with dark color, weight, and density in continuous patterned bands across the canvas.
[1][5] During her time in New York she regularly participated in solo and group exhibitions at various galleries, including James Yu, Davis and Long Co., Salander/O'Reilly, SoHo Center for Visual Artists, Hadler Rodriguez, and Craig Cornelius.
[2][5][6] While her compositional strategy of placing marks within vertical bands remained consistent, her palette of pale colored brushstrokes of paint and beeswax sparingly spread across white or off-white grounds became standard in her work for the rest of her career.
But the pigments in her works are stronger, and the effect is one of deep glowing pools invaded by irregularly shaped fingers of contrasting, crisp colors or washes of paler tones.”[3] Dean Balsamo of The New Mexican stated, “In selecting New Mexico residents Agnes Martin, Florence Pierce, and Mala Breuer, guest curator Elizabeth Dunham chooses to feature mature visions of artists with decades-long commitments to their individual creative expressions.”[7] Grant Vetter of The Arts Beacon stated, “For having maintained this rare balance, and for the amazing strength to have gone it alone, not necessarily against the tide, but surfing the tunnel of the wave from the inside, Breuer’s work deserves not just a second look, but genuine recognition.